1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to an image capturing apparatus such as a digital camera having an optical zoom function, an image capturing method, and a storage medium having stored therein a program thereof.
2. Related Art
Conventionally, there exists an image capturing apparatus that crops only a facial portion of a person from a captured image and separately generates the captured image and a facial image cropped from that portion. One example is an image capturing apparatus that, by recognizing a facial region, cuts out a portion corresponding to the facial region from a captured image with a size and an inclination corrected, and stores the facial image as a separate image file (see Japanese Unexamined Patent Publication No. 2003-92726). With this image capturing apparatus, it is possible to cut out only a facial image even in a case in which the facial image is positioned at an edge of the captured image.
However, in the above-described method, there is a problem in that, since the facial image is cut out from the captured image, the resolution of the cut-out facial image itself decreases.
In particular, in a case in which a person has been captured with a background as a subject, the size that the face of the person occupies in the captured image is small, and therefore the resolution of the facial capture decreases by a great degree if the aforementioned cut-out process is carried out.